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Chitwood’s poetic ‘Gospel Road Going’ brings UNC fourth top prize in a row

By L.J. TOLER
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL -- Michael Chitwood’s "Gospel Road Going" has won the 2003 Roanoke-Chowan Award for the year’s best volume of poetry by a North Carolina resident, bringing the prize to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for the fourth consecutive year.

Chitwood, a lecturer in UNC’s creative writing and continuing education programs, will accept a silver cup for the honor on Nov. 14 from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association. Twelve books were nominated in this, the 50^th year of the prize.

"I’m really honored to have won this award because of the long line of distinguished writers who have won it in the past," said Chitwood. Among them was Carl Sandburg, the winner in 1960 and 1961. Chitwood follows in the footsteps of fellow UNC English department faculty members and poets Alan Shapiro, who won the Roanoke-Chowan last year for "Song and Dance: Poems"; Michael McFee, whose "Earthly" shared the 2001 award with a work by then-North Carolina Poet Laureate Fred Chappell; and lecturer Peggy Rabb, who won in 2000 for "Granite Dives."

"If ever there were a 21-gun salute to poetry in our program and to our amazing faculty, well, here it is," said Bland Simpson, director of the creative writing program in the English department. "The lyric impulse is very much alive and well in Chapel Hill, North Carolina."

Simpson said the program is "proud as the proverbial punch" of Chitwood and his award. "‘Gospel Road Going’ is a terrific follow-up to ‘The Weave Room’ (his previous book)," he said. "Michael is steadily building a powerful portrait of his corner of American society that folks will respond to, learn from and enjoy for generations." 

Tryon Publishing of Chapel Hill issued "Gospel Road Going" last year, Chitwood’s fifth book and fourth poetry book. He also has written three poetry chapbooks, short collections of 16 to 32 pages.

"Gospel Road Going" opens with a long poem, "The Great Wagon Road," set along the route that Scottish-Irish settlers took from Pennsylvania to western North Carolina in the 1700s and 1800s.

"It is a kind of chronicle of Appalachia, and mainly the generation that was my grandparents’ generation, which I think of as the last generation of locality -- being of one place," said Chitwood, who grew up in Rocky Mount, Va. "Radio was new, there was no TV, no Internet, no cars. What they knew was basically within walking distance. That’s forever gone."

Growing up, Chitwood lived within sight of both of his grandmothers’ homes. From stories they told, he crafted poems describing their world. Subsequent poems in the book look at their lives through "their things," he said: "their spectacles, their dances, their potatoes."

"Then, in the third section, I’m saying goodbye to a lot of that, and remembering my grandmother’s death," Chitwood said. "The book is an elegy and documentary to that place and those people that in many ways have vanished, and in many ways will not be remembered."

Chitwood’s non-poetry book was "Hitting Below the Bible Belt" (Down Home Press, Asheboro, 1998), a collection of essays he has voiced on WUNC-FM. They now air on public radio station WVTF-FM in Roanoke, Va. His other poetry books were "Salt Works" (Ohio Review Books, 1992), "Whet" (Ohio Review Books, 1995) and "The Weave Room" (University of Chicago Press, 1998). His work also has been published in numerous literary magazines.

He has won fellowships from the North Carolina and Durham arts councils and is poetry editor of Southern Cultures magazine. He won the Creative Nonfiction Award from the N.C. Writers’ Network in 1994, a short fiction award in 1991 from the Robert Ruark Foundation (a coastal N.C. literary organization), and the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Award from the N.C. Poetry Society in 1993.

Chitwood graduated summa cum laude in 1980 from Emory & Henry College in Emory, Va., with a degree in English and a minor in education. He earned a master’s in fine arts from the University of Virginia in 1986. Besides UNC, Chitwood has taught at both his alma maters, Duke University, Lynchburg and Meredith colleges and numerous workshops. He has been a visiting writer at Elon, Wake Forest and Ohio universities.

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For more information about the award, visit http://www.ah.dcr.state.nc.us/affiliates/lit-hist/awards/awards.htm

Photo URL: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/faculty/chitwood_michael.jpg

Contact: Michael Chitwood, 919-968-1231, machitwood@nc.rr.com
News Services contact: L.J. Toler, 919-962-8589, laura_toler@unc.ed